Noah Rothman on 'The Cult of Kamala' (07-25-2024--Hour1)

[00:00:04] What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to 3 on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to thepetekalendershow.com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button, get every episode for free, write your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support.

[00:00:28] Joe Biden never really had a cult of personality. In the words of Noah Rothman, writing at National Review, he was a functionary, a flawed and fallible bureaucrat, and it would be healthy for the country to revert to the mean after 12 consecutive years in which the president was regarded by his supporters as the personification of the national will. That experiment ended in failure.

[00:00:50] So I want to welcome to the program, Noah Rothman. He is a senior writer at National Review. He's got a book called The Rise of the New Puritans, Fighting Back on Progressives, New War on Fun. So, Noah, welcome to the show. How are you?

[00:01:05] I'm very well, Pete. Good to talk to you.

[00:01:07] Yes, sir. You too. I appreciate you making some time for us today. So this piece is titled Creating the Cult of Kamala. And you saw that what Joe Biden was not really one that had a cult of personality built up around him.

[00:01:23] And is that what you see, I guess, being forced into development with Kamala Harris at this time?

[00:01:32] Yeah, very much. I was not a Joe Biden fan or a supporter in 2020. But if there was an upside associated with his presidency, as I saw it, it would be a departure from the last 12 consecutive years in which there had been a mythos around the president and a fan club, not supporters, fans of a politician.

[00:01:56] And politicians always disappoint you by virtue of the fact that they have to navigate a political environment.

[00:02:01] So to avoid that disappointment, an whole apparatus was erected around the effort on the part of his fans to absolve the president of any responsibility for whatever his bad decisions were, for whatever the ancillary effects of his policies were, unanticipated though they may be.

[00:02:20] Barack Obama and Donald Trump alike benefited to some degree from this dynamic.

[00:02:25] Joe Biden was the begrudging victor of the 2020 Democratic primaries. He was not beloved by the activist class. In fact, they didn't ever really trust him.

[00:02:36] And so my assumption here at the outset of this presidency was this would be a great experiment to see if we could return to a place, not really even since Bill Clinton's presidency, because there's some, you know, some people say that there was a cult around Ronald Reagan.

[00:02:50] There really wasn't at the time when he was president. He was, he was, he was hemmed in by a Democratic Congress and was not really revered by the Republican Party until after he left office.

[00:03:00] So it was really until the nineties that we established this weird pop cultural persona around the presidency.

[00:03:06] And Joe Biden didn't have that. And I thought, well, this would be a great, you know, opportunity to see if we can get back to something resembling a civic compact around a guy who is really little more than a bureaucrat in charge of the executive branch.

[00:03:17] Not so much. Not so much. No, not so much.

[00:03:20] And the Biden administration admitted it when they tried to create this dark Brandon persona around Joe Biden, which was itself a giant flop.

[00:03:27] But it admitted it. It was a confession that you really need a cult of personality around the president if he's not going to be sunk by the forces around which against which he is arrayed.

[00:03:38] And that's what they're trying to do now to Kamala Harris, probably for very good reasons.

[00:03:45] Without a cult of personality, you can't expect somebody who's as maladroit as she is to actually carry a campaign to fruition in November.

[00:03:52] Right. Everybody can kind of see how there is this retconning going on of her and her her background, the positions she has staked out, things she has said, the fact that like we all I thought everybody was kind of in agreement that she was picked up because she wasn't a good campaigner, because she wasn't a good politician, because she didn't have a cult of personality.

[00:04:15] Right. She was sort of an insurance policy for Joe. And now all of a sudden it's like, well, wait a minute, this is the same person that we all I thought we all agreed on who she was, you know, four years ago.

[00:04:26] But now, apparently we were all wrong. Right. I mean, I guess that's why you have to go through the retcon process.

[00:04:32] Well, Democrats never really said that on the record, but on background, people in the White House and in and around the president were free to freely admit it with reckless abandon how little faith they had in Harris's abilities, both as an executive and as a campaigner.

[00:04:49] It was everywhere. And one of the things that I wrote about this morning is Republicans are kind of, in my view, getting the Kamala Harris borders our story a little bit wrong because the story they're telling is actually better than the real story when it comes to Kamala.

[00:05:05] She was tasked with this, you know, this particular thing that the Republicans are saying, you know, she was this fully empowered functionary who was just so maladroit, so bad at her job that she bungled the whole thing.

[00:05:16] No, no, no, no, no, no. She was not empowered to do anything. She was saddled with the job of taking responsibility for a border crisis and having absolutely zero authority to negotiate anything with either taking the lead on negotiations on the Hill or with her counterparts abroad in countries in Mexico and the Northern Triangle and Central America to actually negotiate a deportation regime or anything of the like that would actually mitigate the crisis.

[00:05:41] She only ended up negotiating with private companies' efforts to introduce money and employment opportunities into these countries in order to address the quote-unquote push factors, pushing migrants north to the border.

[00:05:56] And that proved insufficient unto the day, which everybody in Harris' orbit knew.

[00:06:02] And the same story could be said of when she was dispatched to Europe two days before Russia invaded Ukraine in order to stop the invasion.

[00:06:08] Same thing could be said of her being saddled with the job of going after Republicans who are passing voting reform laws at the state level, over which she has absolutely zero authority as an executive, a figure in the executive branch.

[00:06:22] And it was all efforts to saddle her, to burden her with some of the Democratic Party's bugbears.

[00:06:27] And the ancillary effect would be that she would have no impact over them.

[00:06:33] And they would just sort of haunt her and not haunt the administration.

[00:06:37] It was an effort to push off some of the Democrats, Joe Biden's biggest deficits, and burden Kamala Harris with them.

[00:06:45] And she dutifully accepted the role, although her staff complained endlessly to reporters about it.

[00:06:51] And she herself kind of half-joked in an interview with BP that maybe I don't say no enough.

[00:06:56] And she clearly resented all this, and everybody around her most certainly resented all of this.

[00:07:01] But the whole point of it was to demonstrate to her fellow party members, as you just said, Pete, that she's incapable of winning a national election.

[00:07:10] She's just too – she's too – out at the role of campaigner, and now she's too burdened with all the excesses of the Biden administration that she'll never win a national election.

[00:07:21] As you say, it was kind of a quiet insurance policy in the effort to neutralize Joe Biden's biggest rival.

[00:07:26] Didn't end up working.

[00:07:28] Joe Biden collapsed of his own weight.

[00:07:30] And now they have a candidate who was explicitly, deliberately harmed politically by the president so that she could be a less viable figure on the national stage.

[00:07:42] That was their job.

[00:07:44] They wanted this.

[00:07:45] And now it's coming home to roost, and Republicans would be well-advised to say that this was their whole plan.

[00:07:51] I think they think that it would make her into kind of a sympathetic figure, but I don't see why.

[00:07:56] All it does is indict the administration she served for and demonstrate that, A, she is a completely incompetent manager.

[00:08:03] And also, nobody around her, her allies, had any faith in her abilities.

[00:08:09] I don't think that helps her at all.

[00:08:11] So to that extent, then, does Joe Biden's endorsement of her – is that another example of what you're describing here?

[00:08:21] Well, yeah.

[00:08:23] Right?

[00:08:23] Yeah, like, oh, yeah, she's totally awesome.

[00:08:25] Keep going with her.

[00:08:27] I mean, he had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the position that he's in now, which is part of the reason why, aside from the fact that it was really political and debased the setting of the Oval Office last night,

[00:08:40] that his speech yesterday was so impossibly self-serving and really unconvincing.

[00:08:48] He doesn't have any faith in Kamala Harris.

[00:08:50] His administration, the people around him – in fact, the people very close to the president, to the degree that we can associate these sentiments with the president himself – have said to reporters on background, not for attribution, nobody's named in these stories,

[00:09:02] but they have said time and time again that they don't think Kamala Harris can win a national race, that Joe Biden is the only person in the Democratic Party capable of beating Donald Trump.

[00:09:11] No one else.

[00:09:11] And I have to – we have no indication that Joe Biden doesn't actually believe that.

[00:09:17] He may be proven wrong, but in his heart of hearts, he probably absolutely believes that Kamala Harris isn't up to the job.

[00:09:24] Why wouldn't he?

[00:09:24] Just based on her performance in the only national election she's ever run in the Democratic primary race, where she didn't even get a single vote.

[00:09:32] Well, sure, she had to drop out.

[00:09:34] There's ample evidence to suggest Kamala Harris is a spectacularly inept campaigner.

[00:09:38] So you have another piece at National Review headlined Kamala Harris should go full Fetterman.

[00:09:45] And this is a recommendation on who she could pick for her number two.

[00:09:48] Do you think that if she were to follow this suggestion to pick the Pennsylvania governor, who is Jewish, do you think then that that increases her chances?

[00:10:00] Yeah, I do.

[00:10:01] So Harris is burdened with her own record.

[00:10:05] And she deliberately did this to herself, so no sympathy there.

[00:10:09] But she can't run away from her own career.

[00:10:12] She can't say, I no longer support gun buybacks.

[00:10:15] I no longer support eliminating the private health industry.

[00:10:18] You know, all the bizarre positions she took in the primaries and earlier.

[00:10:24] And she doesn't have time now in the campaign to establish some kind of a nuanced approach to her evolution, political evolution.

[00:10:30] But what she does have time for is a grand gesture.

[00:10:33] And the Fetterman model, in my view, is very instructive here.

[00:10:37] John Fetterman has not denounced all the suite of progressive policy preferences that he still supports that he ran on for U.S. Senate in 2022.

[00:10:48] All he's done, with the exception of making a couple of noises about border security, is to stalwartly and full-throatedly support Israel's cause in its defensive war against Hamas.

[00:11:01] That's it.

[00:11:01] And that alone has all but neutralized the impression among his voters that he was some kind of political radical.

[00:11:08] In the summer of 2023, John Fetterman was the most unpopular U.S. senator in the country.

[00:11:13] And in the summer of 2024, one year later, he's now viewed positively by a near majority of Pennsylvanians, including a third of Trump-voting Pennsylvanians.

[00:11:23] It's a pretty remarkable turnaround for him.

[00:11:26] And he's done absolutely nothing to erase the impression in voters' minds that he's a radical.

[00:11:30] He is a progressive radical.

[00:11:31] But all he's done is support Israel.

[00:11:33] This sort of thing is easy, actually, for Kamala to do.

[00:11:37] Kamala Harris has not established herself as an anti-Zionist or even really a vociferous critic of Israel, either in her time in the Senate or in the White House.

[00:11:45] Indeed, she's actually done some things to reassure Zionist supporters of Israel, like condemn the BDS movement, even condemn Barack Obama for withdrawing his support for Israel in the United Nations in 2016.

[00:11:58] The degree to which progressives don't trust her on Israel was actually illustrated in this quote I found from the Progressive Institute for Policy Studies, which deemed her in 2019 a neoconservative.

[00:12:10] They branded her a neoconservative.

[00:12:12] That's how insane these people are.

[00:12:14] Harris would be well advised to lean into this.

[00:12:16] Don't try to reestablish some sort of progressive bona fides with these people.

[00:12:20] You have the opportunity of a lifetime.

[00:12:22] It's what everybody wants, the opportunity to skip right over the primary process, which is the most divisive, most arduous part of the electoral process.

[00:12:32] Everybody hates it.

[00:12:32] You get right to the general election, and that's the fun part.

[00:12:35] She's been blessed with the opportunity to run a general without having to ingratiate herself with her own party and hurt herself in the process.

[00:12:43] She doesn't have to reset at all.

[00:12:45] She can just lean into these expectations.

[00:12:47] And I think it would do her a world of good just by virtue of the fact that it would lend credence to the notion that the Kamala Harris you know is not the person who's running for the presidency now.

[00:12:57] It's a very different kind of person.

[00:12:58] And with 100 days to go before the votes are cast, that might be enough.

[00:13:02] Yeah, that might be.

[00:13:04] You could read his work at National Review, nationalreview.com.

[00:13:07] He's also the author of the book The Rise of the New Puritans, Fighting Back on Progressives, New War on Fun.

[00:13:12] Noah Rothman, thanks for your time, sir.

[00:13:13] Good to talk with you again.

[00:13:14] I appreciate you.

[00:13:15] My pleasure.

[00:13:16] Thank you.

[00:13:16] All right.

[00:13:16] Take care.

[00:13:17] I just realized when I reached out to him this morning to ask him if he wanted to come on, I went back and looked.

[00:13:24] I was like, holy smokes.

[00:13:25] I've been interviewing him for over a decade.

[00:13:28] Although apparently we had a bit of a dry spell for like the last three years.

[00:13:32] I apologize to him for that.

[00:13:34] It's like, wow, that's been three or four years since I last had him on, I think, just based on the message chain.

[00:13:40] So we'll have him back on.

[00:13:42] I do enjoy reading.

[00:13:43] I don't agree with everything Noah always writes.

[00:13:45] But he's a fantastic writer.

[00:13:48] And he's I guess he's now back at National Review.

[00:13:52] But I've been reading his work over there for a long time.

[00:13:55] And he's got a couple of them out.

[00:13:57] We've just covered.

[00:13:57] I think we hit on like three of the different pieces.

[00:14:00] But this idea of the the cult of Kamala.

[00:14:03] And he writes that the Harris campaign and its allies raised vast sums.

[00:14:10] But the Trump campaign can also boast of raising similar totals from his core supporters in the wake of major news events.

[00:14:19] And then he talks about Van Jones on CNN, who was, you know, in awe of the what Rothman calls the avalanche of pro Harris tick tock videos.

[00:14:29] Overnight, the social media outlet transformed the vice president from a figure of scorn and mockery into a phenomenon.

[00:14:37] Van Jones said she's gone from cringe to cool in 24 hours as a whole generation.

[00:14:43] I know has has taken all that content and remixed it in all of these incredible tick tock videos.

[00:14:51] So, guys, selectively edited videos are cool again.

[00:14:57] We can do this again.

[00:14:59] Apparently, this is that these are not cheap fakes anymore.

[00:15:01] No, selectively edited videos used to be verboten as a very, you know, tut, tut, tut.

[00:15:09] Very bad thing to do.

[00:15:11] James O'Keefe.

[00:15:11] No selectively edited videos.

[00:15:13] Ignoring the fact that like literally all news stories are selectively edited.

[00:15:17] But we were not allowed to use selectively edited videos.

[00:15:21] But now we are again.

[00:15:24] Make selectively edited videos great again.

[00:15:27] Kamala Harris.

[00:15:29] Thank you.

[00:15:29] Kamala Harris.

[00:15:32] Yes.

[00:15:32] And yes, I will get to the Biden speech.

[00:15:36] I watched it last night.

[00:15:38] So you didn't have to.

[00:15:40] It was only 11 minutes.

[00:15:41] But I did watch it.

[00:15:42] I have the audio and I'm going to make you listen to it.

[00:15:47] No, I can't.

[00:15:48] Not really, though.

[00:15:49] No, but we'll be listening to it because he once again fails.

[00:15:55] Well, I guess I could just put a period right there.

[00:15:57] But no, I'm going to say he fails to answer.

[00:16:01] The the question, which is at the which is at the heart of why he was making the speech last night from the resolute desk in the Oval Office, which is why?

[00:16:14] Why are you stepping down?

[00:16:15] And he doesn't answer it.

[00:16:19] So basically, it was a State of the Union speech, but only 11 minutes long and no applause.

[00:16:24] Yes.

[00:16:28] I don't know what this is.

[00:16:30] All right.

[00:16:30] Judith.

[00:16:31] Welcome to the show, Judith.

[00:16:33] Hello, Judith.

[00:16:36] Hello.

[00:16:37] Yes.

[00:16:37] Hello.

[00:16:37] What's up?

[00:16:39] Hey, this is not about Biden.

[00:16:41] It's about the two state solution with Israel.

[00:16:45] Okay.

[00:16:46] It seems like everybody has.

[00:16:48] I've not heard one word in all of this about Israel giving up Gaza back about 20 years ago.

[00:16:59] What do you mean?

[00:17:00] You've not heard anything about that?

[00:17:02] I'm just saying I haven't heard anybody talk about that Israel has already given up, I'm sorry, all that property to the Palestinians.

[00:17:12] And all that's happened is Hamas has moved closer, used it as a ground to bomb Israel more.

[00:17:24] Well, I mean, when you say nobody is talking about it, who do you mean nobody?

[00:17:29] Because I can tell you, I have mentioned that often over the last year.

[00:17:36] Oh, well, I listen to you as much as I can, but I didn't.

[00:17:39] Yeah.

[00:17:40] Anytime.

[00:17:40] Whenever we're talking, and look, it's been a while since I've gone into the Israel-Hamas war over there.

[00:17:49] But, you know, October 7th and in the weeks afterwards, yeah, I mean, the Israel, yeah, they pulled out of Gaza.

[00:17:56] The Palestinians have had autonomy in Gaza for, what, now 14 years or 16 years, whatever it's been.

[00:18:05] They've had plenty of time to build a functioning society, and they chose instead to build a terrorist camp.

[00:18:10] That's what they chose to do.

[00:18:12] And so now they're finding out.

[00:18:14] Yeah, and I just think that there's a lot of the people that, you know, aren't aware of that.

[00:18:21] That, you know, there were pictures of Israeli soldiers pulling people out of their homes, and the soldiers were crying because they were having to pull their own people out of their homes.

[00:18:33] Right, when they gave back the Gaza, yeah.

[00:18:36] Well, I would submit that the people who aren't talking about it and the people who don't know about it, those are called Democrats.

[00:18:42] That's, okay, Judith, I appreciate the call.

[00:18:45] No, there's a reason why they don't want to talk about that is because it messes up their narrative, you know.

[00:18:50] Their narrative gives them permission to dump maggots in hotels in Washington, D.C.

[00:18:58] That's why they don't want to talk about that stuff.

[00:19:02] All right, so back to Noah Rothman's piece.

[00:19:07] Do you know who Charlie XCX is?

[00:19:11] I don't even know if I'm pronouncing that correctly.

[00:19:14] Is it Charlie?

[00:19:15] Charlie?

[00:19:16] C-H-A-R-L-I.

[00:19:20] Charlie and then XCX, all capital.

[00:19:25] Charlie XCX.

[00:19:27] Okay.

[00:19:27] It's a British pop singer, probably with bad teeth, but I don't know that for sure.

[00:19:32] But she is British.

[00:19:34] I think it's a she, right?

[00:19:35] It's a she?

[00:19:36] Anyway, Charlie XCX called Kamala brat.

[00:19:43] Not, I don't know if she called her a brat, but she called her brat, which is, that's a good thing now.

[00:19:51] Kids, I'll tell you.

[00:19:54] So that's the term of the times.

[00:20:00] Brat.

[00:20:01] Well, what does brat mean?

[00:20:02] It is a term reserved for the lifestyle embraced by her fans.

[00:20:08] The Harris campaign immediately adopted the label and promoted her candidacy with the same chartreuse, which is like a green kind of a color, aesthetic that graces her albums.

[00:20:20] Again, Noah Rothman here quoting CNN correspondent Jamie Gangle, who assured viewers, quoting the celebrity herself, that brat is defined as being, quote, just that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes.

[00:20:41] See, it's a compliment.

[00:20:46] Right?

[00:20:46] That's a compliment, I guess.

[00:20:48] I'm going to read it again.

[00:20:49] Man, the girl is a little messy, likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes.

[00:20:57] That's who we want for president.

[00:21:01] Yeah, she's brat.

[00:21:04] The effort to make Harris into a meme to which only the coconut pilled, not the red pilled or the blue pilled.

[00:21:12] It's the coconut pilled.

[00:21:13] Have you seen this too?

[00:21:15] They're putting coconut emojis everywhere as a sign of solidarity with the brat.

[00:21:20] Kamala.

[00:21:21] You know what that's about?

[00:21:22] It's because she told that really ridiculous, cringey story about how her grandmother asked whether, like, she just fell out of the coconut tree or something.

[00:21:33] And then she laughs maniacally for no reason.

[00:21:35] It's just a weird story.

[00:21:38] And so now they're trying to make that into a cool thing.

[00:21:40] So it's like, oh, coconut.

[00:21:41] It's like, it's like stop trying to make fetch happen.

[00:21:46] You know?

[00:21:48] It's like boomers using the word sus in an unironic way.

[00:21:56] Right.

[00:21:56] I use it.

[00:21:57] I use it.

[00:21:58] And I'll say things like no cap.

[00:22:00] And I say it to mock.

[00:22:02] OK, let's be clear.

[00:22:04] I am saying it.

[00:22:06] I am saying it ironically.

[00:22:07] I do not use these terms in my normal course of dialogue.

[00:22:13] Making Harris into an abstraction eases the burden on her backers and would otherwise have who would otherwise have to evaluate a flesh and blood human being on her merits.

[00:22:23] Democrats made that mistake once already with Biden and they're not going to make it again.

[00:22:28] Right.

[00:22:29] This gets to what Rothman was talking about with the dark Brandon meme.

[00:22:32] And I remember looking at that like this is really what they're going with?

[00:22:36] This this dark Brandon.

[00:22:38] Like you realize where the term Brandon came from?

[00:22:41] Again, an insult.

[00:22:43] Cringey for the president.

[00:22:45] But they're like, oh, we're going to make it cool now.

[00:22:47] We're going to make it our own.

[00:22:48] Look at this.

[00:22:49] Brandon, he's got the aviator sunglasses.

[00:22:51] No way.

[00:22:51] He takes them off.

[00:22:52] He's got these red laser eyes.

[00:22:54] Look how cool he is.

[00:22:55] Dark Brandon.

[00:22:56] What?

[00:22:59] Guys, you're just embarrassing.

[00:23:00] That's not how this works.

[00:23:01] I feel like I'm the old lady in the Facebook commercial.

[00:23:04] Right.

[00:23:05] Isn't it a Facebook commercial or maybe it's an all state commercial.

[00:23:07] I forget.

[00:23:08] That's not how any of this works.

[00:23:10] Right.

[00:23:10] Where they're posting stuff on a wall, like literally physically tacking things onto a wall.

[00:23:14] That's not how this works.

[00:23:16] It's like a nickname.

[00:23:18] You don't get to pick your own nickname.

[00:23:20] Name.

[00:23:21] Trust me.

[00:23:24] The Hellion says this is the that's just Joe protocol.

[00:23:29] Holy cow.

[00:23:30] Please, please connect and call it that.

[00:23:33] That will ratify it in listeners brains.

[00:23:36] They tried to repackage Hillary.

[00:23:38] I don't know how many times they did.

[00:23:40] They yeah, there were there were always attempts.

[00:23:42] Remember the thing with her looking at her Blackberry with the sunglasses on?

[00:23:45] Remember that?

[00:23:47] Right.

[00:23:48] The problem is that there's well, there's a big problem for Republicans right now.

[00:23:54] And.

[00:23:56] Republicans are feeling very good about Joe Biden versus Donald Trump, as they should.

[00:24:02] Biden was trailing in the polls for like a year.

[00:24:05] So.

[00:24:07] Getting him off the ticket.

[00:24:09] Is not actually a good thing for Republicans.

[00:24:12] Now, Kamala Harris is pretty bad, too.

[00:24:14] And as we went over with Noah Rothman, like she is.

[00:24:18] Not adept at a great many things.

[00:24:21] However, she is not in cognitive decline.

[00:24:26] Right.

[00:24:27] Her impairment is just basic.

[00:24:28] It's static.

[00:24:29] I mean, it's just the same level of of cognitive impairment.

[00:24:32] It's not declining like Joe's was.

[00:24:35] So you can't really tell any kind of a difference.

[00:24:38] And she can read a teleprompter pretty well.

[00:24:41] Well, her problem is off script.

[00:24:45] Her problem is when she sits for the interviews and gets questions that are in the least bit challenging.

[00:24:53] Then it becomes very obvious.

[00:24:56] She is the kid that didn't read the book and is trying to deliver the book report to the class.

[00:25:01] And so there needs to be more of those those those types of events.

[00:25:07] But will the media.

[00:25:10] Comply, will they help her with that?

[00:25:11] I doubt it.

[00:25:13] I doubt it.

[00:25:15] Oh, I forgot to mention this.

[00:25:18] News and Brews coming up August 7th, seven o'clock.

[00:25:21] Heist Brewery and Barrel Arts.

[00:25:23] Seats are limited.

[00:25:24] So you want to get your tickets at WBT dot com.

[00:25:27] That includes the food and a free commemorative WBT pint glass.

[00:25:31] So if you want to come and hang out.

[00:25:33] WBT news and Brews presented by Kraft Body Skin.

[00:25:37] We'll mix and mingle, chat it up, answer questions from you and hang out and talk.

[00:25:41] These are really fun events.

[00:25:43] So go to WBT dot com for all the the information.

[00:25:47] So the Associated Press has a story out headline.

[00:25:50] The fight to define Harris is on.

[00:25:53] And for now, Republicans are dominating Democrats on the airwaves.

[00:25:58] Just days into her new world.

[00:26:00] So this is just to finish that point.

[00:26:02] That.

[00:26:05] Kamala Harris can win.

[00:26:08] The amount of effort that is going to be expelled to get her to win.

[00:26:15] It's going to be unlike anything we have we have ever seen.

[00:26:19] I believe like.

[00:26:21] It's going to it's going to rival the Obama anointment, you know, like the the the elevation of Barack Obama as this sort of heavenly figure.

[00:26:33] And I don't mean that in some sort of metaphorical sense.

[00:26:36] I mean that literally as in they like just like they did with Trump, this cult of personality that Rothman talked about.

[00:26:43] That existed with Obama.

[00:26:45] And I know a lot of people on the left don't think that that occurred, but I know it occurred because I was looking at merchandise that showed Barack Obama as literally a saint in the clouds.

[00:26:56] And he wasn't dead.

[00:26:58] Like, why would you do this?

[00:27:01] He had a whole cult of personality.

[00:27:02] I talk about, you know, the campaign and the blank slate candidate that was intentional.

[00:27:07] They did that for a reason.

[00:27:08] And he could deliver really good speeches.

[00:27:12] He could.

[00:27:13] You could hate him, but he delivered really good speeches.

[00:27:17] And he promised absolution.

[00:27:20] Of course, we got the opposite, as is so often the case in politics.

[00:27:24] But he promised absolution.

[00:27:27] Look, we can have the first black president and then it'll prove we're not racist.

[00:27:31] I've told this story a bunch of times over the years.

[00:27:35] 2008.

[00:27:35] I'm sitting right here.

[00:27:36] I get a phone call from a listener who says he doesn't think he was a black fella.

[00:27:42] He told me so.

[00:27:43] He said that he didn't think that that America would elect a black president.

[00:27:48] And I asked him why.

[00:27:50] And he said racism.

[00:27:52] And this was after the election.

[00:27:54] And I said, well, do you will you now change your your opinion about that?

[00:27:59] Because obviously that opinion was incorrect.

[00:28:01] Right.

[00:28:01] Because America just did elect a black president.

[00:28:05] And he said no.

[00:28:08] He said no.

[00:28:10] It didn't matter.

[00:28:11] I mean, this is this is part of the problem is that you've people get opinions and then they calcify, they harden and you can never move away from them, which gets us to this AP story, which is what Republicans are trying to do.

[00:28:24] To Kamala Harris before the DNC.

[00:28:28] They're spent there.

[00:28:29] They're dumping tons of money into defining who Kamala Harris is before she gets access to her money through the DNC.

[00:28:41] Because you don't get access until you're you're the nominee officially.

[00:28:45] So they got to wait until she's officially the nominee.

[00:28:47] Then it frees up a bunch of the money and they are being outspent.

[00:28:50] Democrats are being outspent right now.

[00:28:52] That's not going to that's not going to remain that way.

[00:28:55] But for now, it is.

[00:28:57] All right.

[00:28:57] That'll do it for this episode.

[00:28:59] Thank you so much for listening.

[00:29:00] I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast.

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[00:29:07] And tell them you heard it here.

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[00:29:14] Again, thank you so much for listening and don't break anything while I'm gone.